After breakfast, while Ivy was upstairs getting dressed for rehearsal, Matt stood by the sink with a dish towel over his shoulder.
"Ren," he said quietly. "What do you want me to do?"
"I don't know yet."
"Do you want me to go to Kevin's? I can go to Kevin's. I can tell Ivy it's a work thing."
"It's a week before Christmas. You're not going to Kevin's. You're not telling her anything about a work thing. I'm not doing that to her." She dried her hands. "We'll get through Christmas. We'll talk about the rest after."
"Okay." He nodded, too fast. "Okay. Whatever you need."
"What I need," she said, "is for you to not ask me what I need every fifteen minutes. I need you to let me think."
* * *
She worked Monday and Tuesday, day shift, seven to seven. She had thought about calling in, and then thought about sitting in the house all day in the silence with the tree and the stockings and the guest room, and she had put on her navy scrubs at six in the morning and driven to Naperville in the dark with the radio off.
Work was a mercy. It always had been. On the labor and delivery floor at Saint Brigid's there was no room for anything but what was in front of you: the woman in Room 4 who had been pushing for two hours and wanted to give up, the first-time father in Room 7 who kept asking if the epidural could leak into his wife's brain, the triage patient who was not actually in labor but was very, very sure she was. Renée moved through it the way she always did, quick and warm and unflappable, and twice that morning she caught herself laughing at something one of her patients said and was startled by the sound.
At one-thirty she delivered a baby girl, seven pounds two ounces, for a twenty-three-year-old mother whose own mother had flown in from Lagos the night before. The baby came out furious and slick and purple and then pink, screaming, and Renée laid her on her mother's chest and the grandmother began to sing in Yoruba, low and steady, her hand on her daughter's sweaty head. Renée stood at the foot of the bed with her gloved hands held up and let herself listen for one full minute. Then she went into the supply room and closed the door and sat on a box of chux pads and cried for the first time since Saturday night, hard and silent, with her fist pressed against her mouth.